Is Wyze a leader, follower or, … with respect for interoperability? constructive comments preferred.
To me Wyze executive seem to be primarily focused within their own ecosystem. with perhaps a tertiary consideration of interoperability and linking up with other home/business automation device systems / imfrastructure.
Similar question within their own Wyze product sets. This seems to be of growing internal interest this year with more commonality across devices / product streams … maybe …?
Many companies seem to primarily focus inward, while as a consumer, I look to integrate across the product set I have and look forward to capabilities of Alexa, Smartthings, IFTTT, …, … but they are only as good as the SUBSET, it seems, of individual products the company provides the linkages for to integrate.
This is where companies that envision ‘‘standard product’ interfaces’ becomes so valuable to their own growth as many customers focus to buy for interoperability.
Wyze is somewhere in the middle when it comes to interoperability. Many of their products officially support:
Alexa
Google Home
Google Fit
IFTTT
They have more on those than a lot of companies do, other than Google/Amazon direct products supporting themselves more, so that gives them a decent leg up on most others, especially with Alexa/IFTTT.
And there are some unofficial things too that they allow 3rd parties to build stuff for, and they don’t go out of their way to interfere or block them as long as they aren’t a big security risk. Sometimes they have clashes while upgrading their security, but it’s not usually intentional.
We would be lying if we said we were not aware of these projects, but we aren’t actively targeting these projects with our security fixes.
Often, these open source ‘hack’ projects target areas that we already have on the roadmap to adjust to make your products even more secure for more general reasons. We would love it if users were able to deploy software securely to their own cameras, but it’s not an easy problem to solve while maintaining security for the rest of our users.
Mitchell
Some of the most popular 3rd Party projects include:
Tiny Cam [Pro]
Docker Wyze Bridge
Home Assistant APIs (Most popular = Joshua’s)
Hubitat integration
Wyze Homebridge
shauntarves Wyze-SDK (python client for controlling Wyze devices)
Wyze Hacks & mini-hacks SD card firmware mod
Probably a TON of other projects I’m forgetting off the top of my head.
Wyze even recently (this summer, 2023) launched a way for 3rd parties to get an official API key from Wyze so that their unofficial API projects wouldn’t get blocked out of their security updates. That’s a huge step above what many other companies do.
Still, Wyze absolutely cannot be considered a leader in interoperability. At minimum they’d need to start announcing things that will be Matter-capable. Anyone who is not implementing Matter is for sure not an inter-operability leader. Matter will give access to almost all the major players: Apple/Homekit, Google Home, Amazon/Alexa, Samsung/SmartThings, Hubitat, Home Assistant, and more. If your stuff can OFFICIALLY work with all of the above systems, THEN you can call yourself a true LEADER in inter-operability. Otherwise, absolutely not.
But we do have to give Wyze credit for the efforts they HAVE made. Alexa, Google Home, IFTTT, and allowing official API keys is nothing to sneeze at. On a scale of 0-10, I’d say Wyze earns roughly a 5.
I decided to ask some AI’s for their opinions on the matter to see how they would rate Wyze on this topic:
Here is how GPT3.5 (chatGPT) rated Wyze on this subject:
This is the input I gave all 3 AI chatbots if you want to see it for yourself
Here is what it output:
I totally agree with GPT3.5’s assessment here, and they hit right on the nose with what I was thinking. But to be fair, while I didn’t bias them with my score, only what they do and do not integrate with, a lot of the information it based it’s decision on, came from what I gave it. So it is possible that what I chose to include or not include may have skewed the scoring and could be altered by adding or removing some of the data inputs. Still, I think the conclusion and rationale for it is pretty fair.
Here is Bard’s Assessment of Wyze’s interoperability:
Claude by Anthropic:
The AI’s have a consensus and agree with my assessment as well. Wyze isn’t the bottom of the pack, but they are by no means a leader either. They’re about right in the middle.
Where is the money to fund development coming from? Both sides have to put in the development work and both sides have to see a fairly quick return on that investment. Both sides have to get that money from Joe User. Which means more subscriptions and paywall services. All the integration and interoperability in the world is useless if it doesn’t last because the company busted out making it and didn’t charge for it.
If it can’t be monetized and realized as a revenue generator rather than a cost center, where is the business incentive?
Amazon clearly learned that with Alexa. It doesn’t make any money. And, as a result, it is on the ropes.
Wyze realized this in the recent past when it realized free unlimited cloud storage wasn’t sustainable.
We all may want interoperability. But are we willing to pay what it will cost to get it?
Amazon should partially blame themselves. There are companies and customers willing to pay them a subscription for some of their services, and they just never allow it. For example, Alexa Guard Plus promised Wyze that they’d allow them to use it and have Wyze customers pay a subscription to have the HMS integrated with it. almost 2 years later and we still haven’t seen a peep on this…Alexa just keeps saying it will support Wyze and other 3rd party security systems “soon” but they don’t make the effort to so. If they are really concerned about making it pay for itself, then they sure aren’t showing it. You’d think they’d prioritize the things that are actually going to allow them to make money off of it., but they don’t. They just keep saying “soon” for years…even though they’ve already figured it out because they’ve added a few third parties already.
I agree with your overall point though. People complain that this is why Wyze doesn’t go out of their way to support RTSP, and yeah, that’s probably absolutely the reason. If everybody used RTSP and Wyze didn’t ever get cam plus support, then none of our products would work at all anymore. This is a risk with interoperability…people can more easily use alternatives instead of mostly sticking with purchases through you.
I am interested to see what Wyze does next year though. I understand this year was camera focused, and I can support that to a degree. However, if that continues indefinitely and they don’t start adding to their ecosystem including new products and features, then it will drive people to start looking elsewhere for their needs for other things and potentially migrate more of their business into another ecosystem. I have been thinking about moving more of my primary use to home assistant since Wyze hasn’t been doing much to address automation and rules engine deficiencies. They dropped projects for smart buttons, and many other things. I am hoping they come back to improve the overall ecosystem next year, but the fact is that I already have 40+ cams…if they only keep coming out with more cams, why would I keep buying stuff from them? I need other things for my smart home too, and if I can’t find them within Wyze anymore, I will get forced to look elsewhere and find workarounds. And this will happen with lots of other people who would love to keep expanding their smart home with Wyze products, but just don’t keep needing more cameras.
So I hope they don’t keep up the year of the camera for too much longer past the end of the year, because it would be sad if they go back to only being a camera company again. I mean, I love their cameras (obviously, since I have over 40 and have bought family some too), and they do it well. But I need to expand my smart home in other ways too, and I’d prefer to do it through them, but next year, if it looks like that’s not happening, I will have to give in to getting others…probably some Matter stuff.
Not that I’ll abandon Wyze or anything. They’ll probably continue to be my primary Camera company, and if this trade-in thing works well, they’re likely to have me upgrading many of my 40+ cams that way.
I know lots of people want them to stop making ANY new products at all, but I’m on the opposite side of that. I think if they stop making other products, they’ll be less valuable. I like expanding my smart home with Wyze stuff. If they stop that, our relationship will somewhat stagnate because there is no longer any room for growth. I’ll still have what I already have, but 40 cameras with a 2800Sqft home means I already have cameras everywhere I really want/need them. Where do we go from there? Their only hope is to reach new people instead, but not as many of their existing fans.
Where is their residual revenue stream? If it isn’t thru a subscription for premium services, like Cam Plus, there is none. Hardware sales is low margin.
More Cam sales leads to More Cam Plus Subscription sales. There is a reason the year of the cam came when it did. I don’t foresee that changing unless they find a way to put the other devices on subscription service.
Lots of companies offer a subscription to get tons of extra router features. Wyze could do that to make this router something besides extremely minimal settings options.
There are a lot of things that could be done.
I know cameras are the main income source due to cam plus, but I would not have even joined Wyze if all they had were cameras. I started with Wyze because they had the best smart scale. The thing many companies forget is that sometimes their other products can act as a funnel. Someone may start with one other thing and then get more, and then cameras that will work with those other things. The other products sometimes bring people to eventually expand into the cameras and THEN eventually get the subscriptions. But if they let all the other ones fall apart, their funnel gets really small, and their market base gets really small.
Regardless, low profit, high volume can be a lucrative business strategy all on its own. low profit doesn’t mean no profit. It’s still profit, and in high volume it’s still a lot of profit. But the main thing is to keep in mind that many of those other things not only add to the progression of current fans, but increase the funnel to expand the market base and bring in more people into the ecosystem even if your only goal is to get 1 out of x of them to eventually get a camera with your subscription. There are plenty of solid business reasons to consider such actions.
And the combined total sales of the HMS, Sprinkler Controller, Air Purifier, and Routers is an insignificant fraction of the annual number of Cams sold that can be subscribed to Cam Plus. Also, the HMS and Cam Protect subscriptions aren’t wholly Wyze realized revenue as the majority of it is being passed thru to Noonlight.
Certainly. No subscription is 100% profit. But even for Cam Plus, a decent amount of it goes to Amazon/AWS including AI-server/bandwidth/storage costs. So cam plus has the same limitations as the other subscriptions. In fact, I would bet the majority of it goes to cover costs since Wyze operates mostly on low profit margins, and their cloud subscriptions are among the lowest of all the companies that do anything remotely similar. So they can’t have large profit margins on that either. However, it is high-volume (lots of cam plus subscribers) and reliable income. I bet their attrition rate is also fairly low compared to the general SAAS industry. So, it’s more about high volume, reliable income, and that’s part of my point. If they want to grow that, I think they should make sure their funnel is large enough to bring in a wider market to keep growing it so that it doesn’t stagnate. I mean, even if it did stagnate, it’s still an awesome reliable residual income for them, but I am just thinking from a business growth perspective to continue to increase it. I doubt their investors will just be happy with stagnation instead of expansion/growth.
Regardless, we don’t really have access to any of their metrics, so we’re all just guessing in dark to a degree. Hopefully they’ll gather enough data from the year of the camera to see if paid off well enough for them, or if it didn’t do as well as they projected. It might be worth it for them to switch back to a period other stuff, then switch back again to cameras only and see if either method makes a statistically significant impact on their growth in key areas.
That was exactly my point also. Hence “The year of the cam”. The endgame is not hardware units sold.
So… Back to Interoperability. Development costs $$$. It then becomes a commodity once developed that needs to be sold to recoup the investment and maintenance cost. It needs to be self sustaining. I don’t see it as a value added service that will drive increased hardware sales enough to cover that expense with the increased volume. I believe it is going to have to be a subscription type service to be profitable.
Which brings us back to where Wyze is in the Interoperability race. They aren’t leading… spending more money on development than they can stand to loose or can’t recoup. They aren’t last and therefore loosing business because nothing is interoperable. They are maintaining pace with their competitors in the Goldilocks Zone. Just enough to stay competitive, but not so much that they are too far in the red on the project.
That’s a fair summary, especially that last paragraph.
I’m just saying Ihope it doesn’t turn to exclusively cameras from now on once this year is over. I totally agree that should always be their main thing, but I also think it would be a mistake to stay there exclusively, indefinitely.
They just keep saying “soon” for years…even though they’ve already figured it out because they’ve added a few third parties already.